Closed Beta Client Observations

So with the announcement of the closed beta and emails being sent out, the client was also made available.

Of course, people who’ve gotten it have had the chance to try out the client in various ways and certain observations have been made:

GameGuard is Present

I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise, given that it’s an asian free to play game and they all seem to come with some variation of a GameGuard-like software installed. Voiced my dislike of this software enough.

Incidentally, it seems that GameGuard and the Steam UI now get along. So you can now play the game through Steam if you wish, without the game crashing or accusing you of cheating!

Full Screen Mode

In the alpha client a fake full-screen mode was used, which a number of users found convenient. This is because they could alt-tab to do other things while playing, without causing the client to crash. Real full-screen mode was implemented in the character creation demo, unfortunately the same crashing problem resurfaced with it.

In the beta client, real full-screen mode is still present but they actually seem to have managed to prevent the game from crashing if you alt-tab or ctrl-alt-delete. Finally! It only took them eleven years to sort this issue out, but I’m glad they did.

Virtual full-screen mode is still in the client, incidentally. You can only activate it through a config edit, however.

Video Recording Formats

A new option in the settings area allows you to set which codec to use for video capture. Codecs include Microsoft Video 1, Cinepak, Xfire Codec, Intel IUYV and a fair number of others. It actually seems it might just pick up on the codecs you already have on your system. What isn’t known yet is how you actually capture the video in-game.

Ship Count

There appears to be 10 different ships this time, as opposed to the 2 available during the alpha. A reminder that a “Ship” is the same as a realm or server in most other MMOs.

At current, a main ship for the importer community hasn’t been settled on. That’s still being discussed, but as soon as a consensus seems to be coming about I’ll post it here and update the importer community page appropriately. Remember you can only roll one character and said character is tied to one ship, so I think it’s important for english speaking players to know where most of the others hang out.

Towards the Future

Beta-access emails are still being sent out in waves and should continue to be sent out up until the day of the tests. If you haven’t gotten an email yet, you still have a chance. It should also be noted that emails to all those who automatically qualified due to their participation in previous tests have now all been sent.

3 thoughts on “Closed Beta Client Observations”

So it’s been tough… still no e-mail, but I still have hope for Raujinn has told me the waves of e-mails continue up to the start of the beta. I seriously had a dream last night, that I got the e-mail, and I was so happy. It’s like when I was younger, I would dream that I had a whole bunch of NES games, as if I had a selection equivalent to that of the rental store. As you may have guessed, when I awoke reality hit hard, but I still got up and I’m still living in hope, for I know that not even Dark Falz himself can stop the e-mail since I have trained so hard for so long. I read a couple threads on the PSO-World forums and saw all the people commenting about how they got their e-mails, and a few who didn’t receive an e-mail yet. Maintaining this hope is becoming increasingly difficult, but as I was told earlier, I know my training is not in vain! But doubts are seeping in through the cracks of my hope… Do you have any words of wisdom/motivation that might help?